What matters right now in business. From WSJ reporters around the world.

All posts tagged culture

Here’s one way General Motors Co. Chief Executive Mary Barra can start fixing her company’s management culture: Ban PowerPoint.
References to PowerPoint and “slide decks” show up throughout former U.S. Attorney Anton Valukas’s brutal, 315-page dissection of how GM executives failed to act on evidence of deadly defects in its cars. There’s a good reason. Lengthy slide presentations have been a substitute for meaningful communication at GM since before Microsoft’s ubiquitous PowerPoint software was invented.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, company executives would lull outside directors with slide shows about their strategies to boost sales and stop growing losses in the U.S. operations – until the directors woke up as the company veered toward collapse in 1992, ousted the top management and promoted a new team committed to…changing the corporate culture.

More than two decades later, Mr. Valukas’s review of management incompetence at GM shows neither that earlier effort at cultural revolution, nor the more recent trauma of being bailed out by U.S. taxpayers, made a big enough dent. More on this after the jump… Read More »

There’s a pretty strong All Entrepreneur Everything mood in the business world these days: Everyone wants to be one, or at least be described as one, from CEOs of giant established corporations to every reality TV star and socialite-turned-DJ under the sun. Less flavor of the month and more flavor of the century, what’s not to like about entrepreneurship?

So when it comes to big companies, fostering an entrepreneurial culture among staff has become something close to a universal priority, at least in words if not action. And how good are they at getting it done?

A new Accenture report released today tried to work out the answer, surveying 1000 business people: 600 corporate employees, 200 corporate decision makers and 200 self-employed, dare we say it, entrepreneurs. One conclusion was that the talk is being talked much better than the walk is walked.